A comparison of MT methods for closely related languages: A case study on Czech - Slovak and Croatian - Slovenian language pairs

Abstract

This paper describes an experiment comparing results of machine translation between two pairs of related Slavic languages. Two language pairs on three different translation platforms were observed in the experiment. One pair represents really very close languages (Czech and Slovak), the other pair are slightly less similar languages (Slovenian and Croatian). The comparison is performed by means of three MT systems, one for each pair representing rule-based approach, the other one representing statistical (same system for both language pairs) approach to the task. Both sets of results are manually evaluated by native speakers of the target languages.